Now on to the T9 kit, I have it fully fitted now (minus the HRC rear brake reservoir as I think it may not be MOT worthy, any one here know?) and here are my thoughts:
The quality of the GRP from Tyga is very good, very light and sturdy. The panels fit together very well and line up to the other panels almost as well as the original fairings. My favourite thing about the kit however is the look of it, I know a lot of you are more fond of the bike in its original form but I guess 'cause I'm one of these typical youths I have to modernise my 22 year old bike, it's just the type of styling I like.
Here are a couple of photo's:
As you can see it still needs to be painted, I'm thinking of having the whole bike white with a big blue Honda wing on the side like this:
But obviously not in those colours. I'm open to ideas.
Now for the bad parts... I was surprised at how many problems I had along the way of fitting the T9 kit, after reading a lot about peoples experiences with Tyga products I thought it would be a doddle, how wrong I was.
Similarly to this thread, viewtopic.php?f=28&t=11704, I started with the front upper fairing and even after drilling out the clocks bracket 10mm, there is no way to fit the upper cowling without the lights hitting the clocks bracket without first modifying the bracket, in my case by modification I mean smacking it with a hammer and grinding useless parts off of it
. Now I understand the bike is old and I do know it has been involved in at least 1 drop but even if it hadn't of been dropped, the bracket would still need modification regardless and I think Tyga should have been more clear on this.Also I may add that at the very front of the bike where the fairing is bolted to the bracket (just below the screen) the small bracket Tyga give you to match the new fairing seen here:
Does not come with a nut and bolt, which is needed as otherwise you can't actually screw the bolt in, in my case the hole in the front of the fairing didn't even line up the hole in the bracket any way (another niggle of mine) so I drilled my own hole and used a tap and die kit to add a thread to it, to allow me to easily screw in the bolt.
The air ducts on the NC23 are known to be pretty useless, but from my research and from looking at the frame the air ducts direct cooler air through the frame and I guess towards the air box, now Tyga's air ducts (referred to as 'consoles' in the fitting instructions) are fitted against the frame with some very poorly cut foam, in my opinion they should have just provided customers with a rectangular peace of foam for us to cut ourselves. Now I have brought this to attention simply because the foam needs hollowing out or it will just block off this airflow, this is something Tyga does not mention in their fitting instructions; it should be.
I will also mention that the air ducts I was provided with had the mounting holes drilled in the complete wrong place! Now I didn't want to send the air ducts back and wait for more and I didn't want to drill more holes in the air ducts as it wouldn't look any good, so I drilled new holes in the frame itself... what a pain just for some little air ducts.
Next I fitted the front mud guard, easy peasy apart from one of the threads in the mud guard needed re-tapping as non of the bolts would thread through it, even though they went smoothly through all the others.
Now the lower fairing, once the upper fairing was in the correct place this was easy to install, with only a couple of minor niggles from me, these being: the fairing sits too close to the exhaust and needs to be spaced out a couple of centimetres, I don't know why they didn't just mould the fairing to keep a good distance from the exhaust in the first place, but this isn't really a problem.
Next is the way in which the lower fairing is held on the left side of the bike near to the back, you can see how it's mounted here:
Why Tyga decided to mount it this way I'm not sure as the side stand has a bracket right there that the fairing could of been bolted to, but because of the shape of the fairing you have to use their bracket to fit the fairings nicely and as you can imagine the side stands' little bracket gets in the way!
The rear under tray/fender from Tyga fits nicely in place as does the rear fairing although from time to time the fairing pops out of where it fits into the tank.
The rear light supplied by Tyga was wired the wrong way round, the break light and normal rear light were back to front, so you couldn't actually tell if the bike was breaking, because the brighter bulb was already on, I don't know how they managed that, and I hope that isn't standard with the rear lights as some people might not notice, hence it could be dangerous for other road users and the biker. As well as that was the number plate bracket, well it's impossible to fit a legal UK plate so the bottom needs to be chopped off not a big deal really but it just seems something simple that could have easily been better.
Now the last bad part, honest! Due to the new under tray and rear fairing the fitting instructions say to fit CDI on the battery box, sounds easy... but Tyga completely forget to tell you that if you move the CDI there, you will have to have some spare wires etc. around if you still want a rear light and indicators! Because the wires need to be split so that the correct wires need to go to the back for the lights etc and the CDI needs its wires, now the problem comes from the earth's for these wires, they all join together at one point, they need to be split from where they join to the earth so that they can reach what they need to earth, this means that the rear light and indicators or CDI will need to have a new wire that leads to the earth.
I am slightly disappointed as I guess I over-hyped Tyga in my mind and expected the fitting to be straight forward but don't let this seem like I'm trying to give Tyga a bad name, after all I am happy with the result even though from reading the bad seems to outweigh the good.
I apologise for the vast amount of text and if you read all of this then I feel sorry for you, as I can hardly describe my type up as exciting.
Any questions or if you want more pictures then don't be afraid to ask.Thanks for reading!
It's great that someone takes the time to do a detailed review, listing all the pro's and con's and difficulties and even admitting the odd oversight.